Monoprose is a local-first markdown editor with a terminal-vintage aesthetic. Open the page and start writing — no account, no setup, no ceremony. Your drafts live in your browser, not our cloud.
✳59–62 characters per line, measured. Ten themes with published contrast ratios. And a plain list of what the research does not support.
The room is quiet in a way only late rooms are.
There is a kind of writing that returns you to yourself — slower,
plainer, closer to the shape of a real thought.
> markdown stays markdown. no hidden state.
And when I close it, every word is still▍
We are not fabricating press. When launch week comes, it earns its place here.
Most writing tools create friction before they ever let you write. A modal wants your email. A toolbar wants your attention. A sync icon wants your trust. Somewhere behind all of it, your paragraph is waiting.
Monoprose starts from the other side. Open the page. The cursor is already blinking. Your last draft is already there. Nothing is in the way, because there is nothing in the way.
What you type is plain markdown. It stays that way when you export, when you close the tab, when you outlive the app. Your text is the asset — not the account, not the cloud, not the editor.
This is a small, deliberate tool for people who take their writing seriously — and a quiet argument that thoughtful software can still be made.
No account. No setup. No splash screen. Open the URL and your cursor is already where it belongs — at the end of the last sentence you wrote.
Keyboard-first, no hidden formatting state, no visual chrome asking to be dismissed. The editor is a textarea with a soul, tuned for long sessions.
Local-first by default. Autosave to IndexedDB, plus a local revision history you can restore from. Your text is always something you can export and own.
nine of the ten shipped themes clear the WCAG AAA 7:1 contrast bar; the tenth (Solarized Dark) sits at 5.6:1, above AA
measured from the shipped CSS, not estimated. Dyson & Haselgrove (2001) found 55 characters comprehended better than 100; Bringhurst's craft consensus says 45–75
the editor has never required a sign-in, and the local-first path is not paywalled
We ship what we can hold to the same standard. The rest waits — and we say that it waits.
The primary experience. No install, no account — just a URL you bookmark.
Sync is built but switched off. It turns on when enough people ask for it — we would rather ship nothing than run a backend nobody wanted.
Only if we can make them feel as calm as the desk. No promises with dates attached.
Open. Write. Close. Come back tomorrow and the sentence is exactly where you left it. Ten themes tuned for long sessions, drafts pinned, everything autosaved, the rest out of sight.
# The room in the afternoon
She remembered the house by its light, not its rooms —
how every hour moved the gold across the floor, and how the gold was never the same hour twice.
— 1,284 words · autosaved ✓
Your drafts stay plain markdown — a format humans can read in any editor and agents can read without scraping. Monoprose exposes itself through open, boring, future-proof endpoints. No AI gimmicks. Just portable text.
Every palette ships with its measured contrast ratio. Nine of ten clear WCAG AAA (7:1). We publish the tenth too, because hiding it would make the other nine worth less — and we publish what the research does not support, for the same reason.
recomputable from lib/themes.ts · WCAG 2.1 relative luminance
The column holds 59–62 characters. Dyson & Haselgrove (2001) found 55 characters per line comprehended better than 100, with no speed penalty. This is the single best-evidenced choice in the product, and it is a number you can measure yourself.
A dark background dilates the pupil, and a wide pupil lets light in through the edge of the lens where focus errors are largest — so the image on your retina gets softer. Maximum contrast makes that worse, not better. Every theme here backs off both ends.
The evidence points the other way: reading dark text on a light background measures faster and more accurate (Piepenbrock et al.). We ship a dark default because people want it at night — not because it is kinder to your eyes. Two good light themes are one click away.
Monoprose went live this week. When writers have actually used it and have something to say, their words go here — attributed, and with their permission.
Writing locally is the whole point of this tool, so it is not the part we charge for.
The full editor, every theme, revision history, export, and the agent endpoints. No account, no trial clock, no feature held back.
Start writingDrafts on every machine, conflict-safe. It is built but switched off, and turns on only when enough people ask. Founding Writers get it at no extra cost.
Ask for syncWhy charge at all? Because a tool paid for by its readers answers to its readers. No ads, no telemetry resale, no attention farming.
You can start writing right now without leaving an address. The list is for founding seats and the occasional letter about what changed.